Boyfriends

“Boyfriends” is a series of drawings with text, I’ve created with Kara Jansson Kovacev (cloudbuilder). We’ve paired iphone drawings (hers) with small stories (mine).

“Boyfriends” is fact and fiction based–renditions of terrible past boyfriends (much is fiction, much is fun…!) This is the first part in this series:

Terry

Terry was an asthmatic poet who conversed with strippers in foreign tongues as not to offend their gentle egos. His body was like a sack of leftover flour in a warehouse after a flood–porous, sticky and lacking in any form.

I met him at Starlights, a chain where movie star lookalikes danced on stage wearing tall,white cowboy hats and prowled about on all fours searching for thrown money. He was a regular and often composed sonnets about the girl’s eyelashes and less seen body parts. He bought me a Skydiver, three parts Drambuie, one part beer–a lot of bloody guts mixed in with calm perseverance.

Breaking Point: Terry had a brush with death one late evening with a votive candleand felt the need to write, long miserable epic poems about the experience and recite them in moody Armenian delis where not trace of any Armenian food could be found.

Hen

Hen was a Moroccan cook I met while working in the kitchen at Bob’s Big Boy. He wore an old polyester brown uniform that was so tight that his skin chafed violently with every movement, leaving deep red marks on his neck and inner elbows. He was a kind man, who stole vast amounts of chili and fried shrimp from the salad bar to give it to the waitresses to feed their hungry children.

His sister Fatima often cooked Tanjine for us in their small hot kitchen as we fucked doggy-style in his bedroom on his floral bedspread. He often sang French songs as he sucked on pickled lemons while rubbing my breasts with Algerian Lavender oil.

Breaking point: His brother Fas pinching my ass and scratching his balls while we watched Casablanca.

Paul

Paul was a systems analyst who sat next to me at work. He weighed 300 lbs and smoked cigarillos in the janitor’s closet on his breaks. He had a Van Dyke beard and often ran his chubby knuckles through it while he stared at me as I calculated risk losses and annuitization options.

Our first date was in the back of his orange Chevette, he rubbed his cock and did whippits with a dairy maid cream can as I unhooked my bra.

Breaking point: His love for Arlo Guthrie and deviled ham sandwiches during sex.

Eulogio:

Eulogio was my neighbor when we lived in Orlando. He was the cleanest man I’ve ever known and smelled like fresh Hibiscus flowers and sanitized public restrooms. I visited him after my job at “Art’s Shell Repository” and we’d eat lengua rellena (stuffed tongue) on his back porch as I stroked his thighs and licked the insoles of his feet. He had a habit of wearing slick slacks so anytime I sat on his lap, I’d often slide right down; this always seemed to occur just as his mother came in bearing plates of braised plantains. She’d giggle, ignore me on the floor and spoon feed him with a silver baby spoon.

Breaking Point: His uncle coming over with shotgun and waving it over our heads insisting the Spanish-American War was not over.